Michael is now back from his
holiday. I'm pleased to say that he has returned safe and well. The same can't be said for his computer, so it is my turn to step in and churn out some drivel. Sorry, that should read 'a quality poorbridge article'.
Anyway, the best I can do at short notice is to take the proverbial out of one of my long suffering partners by perusing old hand records and scorecards and digging out some misdemeanours. Back in January a non-regular partner of mine and I entered a heat of the Pottage Cup — the HIWCBA county pairs championship.
Jim played well while I desperately tried to throw matchpoints at our opponents. At least the slam missing four key cards was undoubled and only two off. Despite my best attempts we qualified for the semi-finals.
Our semi-final was in March. This time it was Jim's turn to spurn matchpoints right, left and center. Ably assisted by yours truly of course, but I will focus on Jim with this particular PBOTW. Just because I can.
The auction was fairly straight forward, but 1
might have been on a 2 card suit as we were playing five card majors with a short club. I didn't investigate a club slam (small or grand) as this was pairs and 6NT seemed a sensible spot without giving away further information.
4 was led and Jim was relieved to see the queen hold at trick one. The contract would appear fairly trivial at this juncture. The big question is, should you take the diamond finesse or bash down three rounds of diamonds from the top?
The diamond finesse will play better if East holds
Q x x precisely, while playing from the top is better if West holds
Q x precisely (assuming that one top diamond can be cashed early to guard against a stiff queen with West). Missing five cards the odds would appear to favour taking a second round finesse so Jim quite correctly crossed to
A in hand, both oppo following small. He then crossed to
Q in order to take the diamond finesse. Here's where the genius of the play lies. Jim decided that he would test clubs and so cashed
K Q. Oh dear. Both oppo followed, but when the diamond finesse lost West exited a heart. That killed Jim's final entry to dummy while the diamonds were blocked. Alas Jim hadn't made the anti-percentage play of junking
10 7 on dummy's
K Q so the clubs were blocked too, and the cold slam drifted one off.
Let's turn to another hand and look at the defence:
No, I'm not quite sure why I didn't put 2
on the table on the first round. It might have helped Jim find the magical lead of
A. Alas Jim chose to lead
2, fourth highest of his longest and strongest. That wasn't poor but it did gift declarer an extra diamond trick. Declarer proceeded to cash six rounds of clubs and Jim parted with a spade. Dear oh dear Jim. Declarer now cashed four rounds of spades to come to thirteen tricks. Another bottom for us.
We've had some dodgy defence and declarer play. Just for completeness let's take a look at some dubious bidding.
I dutifully took out the double, though 5
is probably not the bid of choice for most sane people. Needless to say this wasn't a great contract and 500 away was another bottom. Still, at the end of the day we managed to scrape through to the final. That will be next week's PBOTW unless you scoundrels come up with something better in the mean time! Michael tells me you've already sent in a few unpublished articles, but for now he can't access them. Apologies for that.
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